


and the ringing all we'd eat

by some_stars



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nightmares, Telepathy Problems, offscreen minor character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 12:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4222251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/some_stars/pseuds/some_stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Is it okay for me to do, move, and act? Can I trust the world? Is it okay to be me?</i><br/>--the first three "existential questions" of early childhood in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stages_of_psychosocial_development">Erikson's stages of psychosocial development</a></p><p>(or: It's not the pain that hurts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the ringing all we'd eat

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the beginning and ending quotes are from [Sudden](https://books.google.com/books?id=c9M4CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT28&lpg=PT28&dq=and+the+ringing+all+we%27d+eat&source=bl&ots=i3t8KREXVq&sig=InBN0_p0OzH06NrrlyXXIT2DZjE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ycyMVaZLzMiwBfyzgogM&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false) by Nick Flynn.
> 
> More detailed content notes are available at the end.

*

_a light coming on  
in an empty room_

*

Certain facts of their situation, Sun observes, become easier to manage with time.

They learn to control the visiting--how to push gently, first, like a knock on a door, and how to slide continuously back and forth to avoid getting caught in an awkward mime (and how to talk into a silent phone, an even easier solution). They can leave when they want to, most of the time, and pop right back after being interrupted. They learn how to split their attention between two places so smoothly that no one around them notices anything amiss. The perceptual distortion of visiting, especially while sharing at the same time, causes some difficulties--navigating multiple layouts of furniture and walls or sidewalks and traffic is a minor challenge; holding multiple conversations with each other and with outsiders all at the same time is a larger one, and they progress at different rates.

Nomi, for instance, masters the conversational juggling act almost immediately, as long as she can remain more or less stationary while she talks and types. Will still trips over himself sometimes when he's just sharing for practice, but whenever there's a crisis he flows so smoothly that Sun can tell he'll quit overthinking it soon enough--and anyway, he's had less time to hone his skills than the rest of them, after his months asleep.

She didn't predict the zero-to-sixty rise in Capheus's skill at navigating four, sometimes five places and bodies in quick succession, visiting, sharing, and driving seamlessly. She should have. He was already so good at living in the world when they first met, bending to adapt himself to all its shifts and shocks, and his body allowed her in easily before she even understood what she was doing with it. So much about life as a cluster of sensates seems to come naturally to him. To a lot of them. Sun can feel their comfort--this is the nature of the cluster--but she doesn't understand it. Or, she understands but doesn't feel.

(The vocabulary is a challenge, too. Sun never found it difficult to speak, before. Painful, distasteful, ineffective and even dangerous, sometimes--but it was never, ever hard.)

She's easily Capheus's equal in skillful visiting, though her confinement gives her an unfair advantage over the rest of them. She's memorized every inch of every room she could possibly be in when someone calls for her, and while she has no phone to pretend with, she suffers no real social penalty from gazing downward and muttering while she leans against a wall in the yard or sits at a sewing machine. Also, she's more frequently in solitary, now, which eliminates the problem entirely. Also, some people already think she's crazy, and that sort of reputation--so long as she can control it--creates opportunities. Prison life, Sun has learned, is just business with more knives and fewer lawyers.

She knows that some of the others consider their increasingly intense emotional bleed-through another skill to be embraced, as they start to feel what the others feel not only at the height of terror or passion or grief but in a hundred moments throughout the day, in dreams--sometimes even snatches of thoughts, silent or spoken. She has to concentrate to hear the actual sounds instead of just the meaning, and she still doesn't _know_ these languages but the words and cadences don't sound like clanging babble anymore. The sounds, like the words and the emotions behind them, seem to belong to her.

Some of them see this almost automatic empathy as a strength. Sun doesn't. She tries. She can't.

Her walls become a struggle to build back up, then start to crumble even as she erects them. All inside her, doors are swinging open. It's not the others' painful feelings that disturb her; she knows where to put those, and often she can help beat them back--organizing Kala's scattered resentments, slowing Lito's spinning anxieties, lending her disciplined mind as willingly as she lends her fists. She enjoys that kind of help, mostly. She never imagined that she'd end up a teacher, but she's had a great one to imitate. And she is still, whatever else she becomes, someone who takes care of her family.

The good feelings, on the other hand. The good, she finds...unmanageable.

*

(the smell wakes her and the usual ache in her chest barely twinges; her father serves the pancakes and watches her eat, old skin stretched thin over his little skull as he smiles; against her cheek she feels the ghostly scratch of an old rug, the memory of piano notes mixing with the notes he hums now as she chews--)

(amaranth and onions and tomato paste measured with a plastic bottle cap, a thumbful of thick red palm oil, the nose-tickling bite of chilies, all sizzling together, filling every breath; less of a tickle than there should be, because even with the good drugs her mouth is still tender, still hurts sometimes, but he can't talk her out of throwing in at least enough chilies to keep the _sukuma wiki_ bright and lively on his own tongue; they steal every bite out from under death's nose; even when she couldn't feed him he knew how love tasted--)

(the scent of the _shahi tukra_ sneaks up the stairs ahead of her father, under the door to her room before he has a chance to knock; most days since the rescue she comes home from work and sits alone, reads or prays, or sometimes visits, very far from here, far from what she broke, but she'll open the door for him; she will never not open the door for her father, because he will never open it himself; he will never ask for more than her hunger, whatever that might be--) 

*

Wolfgang travels more than any of them--even Will and Riley, who don't dare stay in one place too long but wish they could, and therefore make less than strategic choices now and then--but he visits less, hardly ever unless he's needed. With Whispers and the rest of the sensate killers still several steps behind them, and with Sun cooped up and eager (and, frankly, better than he is at the kind of lightning-strike, almost surgical violence the others usually require), that's only two or three times a month at most. His half-life on the run keeps him too busy for the echo of seven others. This is of course a lie.

He knows--he _feels_ \--how some of the cluster experience the connection as love, safety. As communion. He remembers the heat of mouths and hands and flesh pressing against his solitary body, and how, knowing he could reach out for whatever he wanted, he'd been content to lie still and warm and be touched. He remembers the first touch of Kala's mouth against his, how their brains slapped together a sketch of wetness and pressure from memory but invested that composite kiss with more intimate knowledge than a fuck, more than a fifty-year marriage--anonymous and unforgettable all at once. Even more than that, he remembers her eyes. Her eyes were only her own. Eyes can't be invented.

It would be easy to blame his self-imposed isolation on Kala. If he opens his mind to anyone, she might sneak in. If he listens to anyone's voice, he might hear hers, and if she asks he doubts he could say no a second time. He could tell himself this is why he struggles to shut himself out, and he _is_ afraid these things will happen, but it would be a lie. He has much more to fear from the cluster's communion than Kala--or any of them--have to fear from him.

Dropping off the map and out of sight of the rising, squabbling heirs to the Bogdanow empire was easy enough. Living off the grid for almost a year, keeping Whispers in his sights and helping to spring trap after trap while dancing just beyond his reach, poses a worthwhile challenge that he almost enjoys. But no plane, no car or train or freighter can outpace the memories that don't belong to him, the memories that make his hands shake. Wolfgang can fire a grenade launcher off his shoulder with his feet planted steady as concrete blocks; he can take a steel-toed boot to the ribs without losing count of seconds and centimeters as a plan unfolds; his hands don't shake. They don't. They don't anymore.

For that, more than for his new nightmares, or the constant echoing silence where Kala's voice should be that hurts in a way no human could ever evolve to endure, or even the distraction that cost him Felix while he was busy cracking a BPO safe with Lito's hands and ears twelve thousand kilometers away, protecting the cluster by abandoning his brother--more than anything else it's for making his hands shake again that he can't, will never forgive them.

It's not their fault. He doesn't blame them. He doesn't hesitate to come to their aid, or treat them as anything less than friends. But he doesn't share when he isn't needed, and he tries as hard as he can not to listen, because when he listens, he hears.

*

(her father across the bolted-down table seeing her for the first time, her father who never bothered to come and see; she doesn't wipe away her tears this time; he looks her in the eye; he says, _my daughter_ ; he says, _without my daughter--_ )

(her mother's hands wrap around her own slimmer, smoother ones, rough unmarked skin enfolding the faded henna; every choice she makes kills someone, kills someone's love, kills her; she can't pretend anymore she doesn't know how to fight and so her mother squeezes her hands and sits with her for hours, doesn't say a word--)

(the knife in his mother's hand, her tall body stepping in front of him, taller than the men at the door, a thousand miles tall with her neck stiff and straight, fists clenched as her voice trembles; sheltered in her towering shadow he forgets, for a moment, how to be afraid--)

*

Before all this crap started, Nomi hadn't had a bad dream in years.

It had never been a huge problem, nothing that kept her from living her life, but ever since she was little she'd wake up sweating and choking on a scream at least a couple times a week. She never could remember what she dreamed about. Even after what happened in the locker room, when she started having them almost every night (and not always choking back the screams anymore, to her parents' ill-concealed irritation), her nightmares remained more swirls of vague terrors and urgent compulsions--hide, escape, scream, though of course she never could--than memories or stories.

Getting out on her own helped a little, and finally saving up enough to start transitioning helped a little, but it wasn't until almost three months into sharing a bed with Amanita that Nomi first woke up and realized she hadn't had a nightmare all week. In fact, she hadn't dreamed at all, and aside from a few mostly pleasant, all drug-induced journeys with Neets at her side, she hasn't since.

(She'd woken Neets up to tell her, that morning, an hour before her alarm clock was set to go off, and Neets had yawned, then beamed, then said, "Well, yeah, scared 'em away, didn't I," and pulled a stupid face and growled like a cartoon monster. They'd made good use of that hour.) 

Still, she's sure she could cope just fine with having bad dreams again if they were like they used to be, or even if they were worse, if they were clear and terrible and, well, _nightmarish._ A lot of the time, they are. Nomi dreams about a vast avalanche burying her alive, her throat packed with snow and limbs frozen in place but never allowed to die, kept safe and silent as a statue in her blinding white tomb. She dreams of a baby wrapped in purple, thin and silent, passed down a line of shadows from hand to hand until she can't see it anymore, until she turns to run back to her mother's arms and finds only bloody stumps held out to cradle her.

Some nightmares are everyone's fault. Nomi finds herself standing on a stage under a burning spotlight as rough hands rip mask after mask from her face until only her skin remains for their fingers to tear at; she's stripped naked and strapped down tight, struggling against leather cuffs, lungs screaming for air they can't get; she squints helplessly, paralyzed, against the quick bright flash of a mirror--a knife--a camera--while drunk, raucous laughter echoes in the darkness, multiplying until it becomes a chorus. That kind of shit, though, Nomi can handle. Their collective trauma is no fun to sleep through, but it's diluted in the mixing, divided by eight, so that even her own contributions to the pot melt and morph until she hardly recognizes them.

More importantly, cluster nightmares don't stick around after she wakes up. She'll cry a little, maybe, and sometimes her heart takes a while to stop racing after a really bad one. But the hurt from the nightmares doesn't last, no matter how violent and terrible they are.

Nomi understands violence. She always has, if not quite so comprehensively as she does now. It's not the violence but the other things that creep through the link, some nights--not the pain that hurts; no, what hurts--

What she'll never understand--

*

( _next time you come home,_ his mother tells him three days after the first interview airs, when he finally works up the nerve to answer the endless ringing, _you bring that nice boy of yours, that nice smart boy, we all want to meet him,_ and he almost drops the phone--)

( _proudest damn day of my life,_ his dad says, and a couple beers later, _your heart's too big for your own fuckin' good, kid, always was,_ and a couple after that _nobody knows shit, you hear me, don't listen to us, 'cause all I know is she would've been so damn proud of you_ ; the fireworks are long since over so he can hear the wet hitch in his father's slurring voice, and that sound rips him open but it's good, good, good--)

(she's a couple meters from the escalator down to baggage claim when her feet stop dead, the scream of skidding tires ringing in her ears like a lullaby; she stands there, frozen, until she hears his voice drifting up the escalator steps, hears the way he sings her _name_ , and then--

Then she can run.)

*

_as if a mountain range had opened  
inside her, but instead_

**Author's Note:**

> In the third section (Nomi), there are some very brief descriptions of nightmares that include or reference child death, mutilation, psychiatric abuse, and violent/disturbing imagery in general. Aside from that: this is a story about child abuse in which no child abuse is described or even mentioned, but if you know the characters, you know what they're thinking about.
> 
> 6/28/2015: Having rewatched the series again, I realized that a couple of the vignettes here don't quite match canon. Sorry--I have no excuse but my terrible memory that can't even remember when it's not remembering right. Hopefully everything still _feels_ correct, at least.


End file.
